An Inconvenient Plant

This indignant attitude may form the ultimate irony in today's debate over re-establishing rare native plants such as the Raven's manzanita or sparing the magnificent — though artificial — forests. City dwellers' idea of "nature" is far less likely to be defined by the dunes and brush actually natural to this area, but instead by an imported plantation manufactured to instill awe for higher authority.

"Trees have not only come to symbolize nature to us ... they have become a kind of 'second nature' that stands in contrast to the 'first nature' of the original landscape cities have in most cases displaced," wrote Paul Gobster, a USDA scientist who has authored several papers on San Francisco land-use conflicts.

Gobster reckons the average city resident gives little thought to the merits of native plants in an urban setting. But he's dead sure of this: Once you propose buzz-sawing trees, you'll always have a problem — always. Apparently, it's our second nature to object to the removal of "second nature."

And while people killing trees can induce general fury, trees killing native plants doesn't seem to bother most folks. "What you're doing when you plant those trees is trapping the fog, which condenses on the leaves and needles and drops as artificial rain, increasing the precipitation by a third," says Steve Edwards, the director of the Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Berkeley's Tilden Park. "You foster a jungle of blackberries, ivy, and poison oak."

A strikingly tall and thin man with a long white beard of the sort fashionable in the time of President Rutherford B. Hayes (whom he resembles more than a little), Edwards refers to the nonnative trees shading the Raven's manzanita and other native species as "junk plants."

"The main things those trees do is reduce the native diversity," he says. "There would have been, like, 60 types of native plants growing there, maybe 100. And a lot of them are very rare and unique to the site. When you plant those trees, you end up with maybe two or three species. You reduce the uniqueness of California to a homogenized redundancy."

Statistics back up Edwards' scenario: Fully half of the native San Francisco vegetation listed in the 1958 edition of John Thomas Howell, Peter Raven, and Peter Rubtzoff's A Flora of San Francisco, California has been driven to extinction. When asked whether it's worth clearing out 75 acres of trees to benefit native plants, Edwards seems insulted: "We're talking about a postage stamp of land. It's the least we can do."

He shakes his head. "The whole of San Francisco was once a floral treasure trove. Can't we do just a little bit? My God!"

At Lobos Creek, restorationists did more than a little bit: Back in 1996, a dozen acres of trees, ballfields, and prime teenager hanging-out areas were bulldozed in favor of rolling dunes dotted with San Francisco lessingia, an endangered native grassy herb.

Karin Hu offers a wan smile as she traverses the gray boardwalk weaving throughout the restored dunes in the extreme southwest corner of the Presidio. For the City College professor, the experience of returning to her childhood haunt is disillusioning in the same way Gertrude Stein was less than enthralled with her old Oakland neighborhood.

At Lobos Creek, there is.there there. The boardwalk sends a clear message: You are here. Nature is there. Hu grew up tromping through these open fields, and believes it played a role in her decision to study animal behavior. If her childhood forays had been restricted to the boardwalk, would her interest have been piqued?

While native-plant advocates have praised the restored dunes as a living museum, Hu feels the description is all too apt: "Museumification" is a much-used pejorative among restoration critics. "This boardwalk has made this area an 'exhibit' — but it's not a good enough exhibit for people to come out and see," she says. "I see kids out here doing restoration work, and that's great. But are they coming back on their own?"

Indeed, on an utterly gorgeous Sunday during the noontime hour, only four or five other people wandered along the boardwalk — none of them children.

The future dunes — and fenced-off, isolated Raven's manzanita recovery sites — may also be accessible only by narrow boardwalks, if at all. This leaves Hu highly ambivalent.